"The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom": Alternative Economies of Excess in Blake's Continental Prophecies

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2006 by Castellano, Katey

Blake likewise vehemently opposes the progress of industrial capitalism and commodity driven "possessive individualism," yet he understands the small, organic artisan or pastoral community as the founding tradition for that political perspective. Blake's advocacy of and participation in small, interconnected economic and social networks reflect his emergence from a family grounded in radical religious dissent. Stephen Behrendt notes that these radical dissenting sects

seemed typically to have promised their followers a community cohesion that was presently lacking in their daily lives, and this promise was especially attractive to the urban populace, which was already showing the effects of that alienation and despair which have come to epitomize the modern urban experience. (389)

It is important to point out that Blake most certainly does not understand these communities to be linked together by the benign influence of the resplendent monarchy and Anglican church, as the secular conservative thinker Edmund Burke does; in fact, he attributes rather sinister intentions to the church-state hierarchy. Yet Blake nevertheless grounds his political position in the cultivation of the tradition of radical dissent that goes back to at least the early seventeenth century. The avant-garde quality of Blake's work is engendered by his desperate clinging to aspects of his life that are on the verge of dissolution: his radical religious tradition and his artisan status as an engraver.

Thus, rather than emerging from secular liberalism, Blake's Continental prophecies emerge from the idiosyncratic, antinomian Christian tradition he inherited from his family and the dissenting artisan community at large. Conservative traditionalism, according to Anthony Quinton, asserts that "a historically evolved social order incorporates the accumulated practical wisdom of the community" (17).3 E.P. Thompson and G.E. Bentley Jr. speculate that Blake was affiliated with a radical dissenting group, the Muggletonians, "a dwindling band of determined worshippers clinging to a faith first articulated during Cromwell's time a century before" (Bentley 10). After their initial triumph and regicidal extremism, radical religious dissenting groups, such as the Muggletonians, were defeated and pushed entirely underground, creating a secret and archival culture. Antinomian religious groups, according to E.P. Thompson, "would hire a room [in a tavern] for their meetings, drawing up an agreement with the publican to install a locked closet holding their books and records" (67). If Blake emerges from such a religious group, then he is conservative in the sense that he attempts to conserve and archive the unique beliefs and Biblical interpretations of his antinomian religion, a religious tradition that exists primarily within archived and hidden texts. Thus, Blake's conservatism marks a return of a repressed-literally repressed-part of English history. In Blake's time, radical religious dissent still manifested its original seventeenth-century critiques of the old corruptions of the monarchical church-state (these are the beliefs that lead scholars to argue that Blake is a radical liberal), and Blake further makes use of this tradition to criticize the new phenomena of rational liberalism, empirical science, and utilitarian economics.